Regardless of Age, Children
Susceptible to
False Reports of Experiences When Given Misinformation by Parents, Says
Latest Research** Article found by Andrew
E. Carlan,
Esq.

After decades of
promoting validators and destroying father-child
relationships, after promoting man-child sex in its June 1998 journal
and
then dishonestly distancing themselves from the article in a letter to
Rep. Tom DeLay, these experts per excellence of family court now admit
they don't know what they are taking about, which is what we fathers
rights
lawyers were trying to tell courts all along.

Well better, thousands of trashed lives, suicides, male
violence
in schools late, always better late than never that such followers of
every
strange wind that blows in our society, now admit that they are suckers
and have made suckers of every judge who ever listened to them.

REGARDLESS OF AGE, CHILDREN SUSCEPTIBLE
TO FALSE REPORTS
OF EXPERIENCES
WHEN GIVEN MISINFORMATION
BY PARENTS, SAYS
LATEST RESEARCH

More
Evidence That Children Can Be Unreliable AsWitnesses In Forensic Investigations

Washington -
Much research
has examined the suggestibility of preschool age children when
recalling
events. Now, new research shows that even school age children are
susceptible
to misinformation from parents and sometimes fail to differentiate fact
from fiction even when given specific instructions to help direct them toward
the truth. These findings are reported on in the March issue of the
Journal
of Experimental Psychology:Applied, published by the American
Psychological
Association (APA).

Psychologists
Debra Ann Poole,
Ph.D., of Central Michigan University and D. Stephen Lindsay, Ph.D., of
University of Victoria, assessed whether misinformation from parents
would
influence the eyewitness reports of preschool and school age children.
In the study, 114 children (3 to 8 years old) participated in three
sessions
over a four-month period to examine their recall of actual experiences
and the influence of parental misinformation on their eyewitness
reports.

First, the
children interacted
with a man called "Mr. Science" who showed them four science
activities.
Mr. Science demonstrated each activity and then encouraged the child to
try it out for him or her self. After the science demonstrations, the
children
were asked open-ended questions by an interviewer. Some of the
questions
were: "Tell me what you saw or heard or did in the science room, so I
will
know about them too" and "Can you tell me more so that I will know all
about what happened in the science room?"

Three months
later, storybooks
about the visit with Mr. Science were given to the children's parents,
with instructions to read the story aloud to the child. The story
described
two science demonstrations the child had experienced with Mr. Science
and
two science demonstrations that did not occur during the child's
interaction
with Mr. Science. Each story also described a fictitious event about
the
child being touched by Mr. Science in a mildly unpleasant way.

Shortly after
the parents
read the story to their children, an interviewer visited the children
in
their homes and asked open-ended questions about the visit with Mr.
Science.
Following these free-recall questions, children were asked yes/no
questions
about specific events, such as "Did Mr. Science have a machine with
ropes
to pull?" A yes response elicited, "Tell me about the machine" and a no
response elicited, "Can you tell me about the machine?"

The final
phase of the interview
was a source-monitoring procedure - the children were reminded of the
story,
told that some events in the story might not really have happened
during
their visit with Mr. Science, and asked to indicate whether particular
events appeared in the story and/or actually happened with Mr. Science.
A month later, the children were interviewed for a third time, without
any further exposure to misleading suggestions.

In the
immediate interview,
almost all children reported at least some information, and their
reports
were highly accurate. But soon after exposure to the storybook, 40 of
the
114 children (35%) reported a total of 58 fictitious events during free
recall of the interaction with Mr. Science (including 17 reports of the
suggested unpleasant touching experience). Surprisingly, the
authors
found that the younger (3- to 4-year-olds) and older (5-to 8-year-olds)
children equally often reported suggested events in response to
open-ended
questions such as, "Can you tell me more about what happened during the
science experiment?" Accuracy of responses further declined when the
children
were subsequently asked direct yes/no questions, such as "Did Mr.
Science
have a machine with ropes to pull?"

Unfortunately,
said the authors,
children's responses when prompted to describe events did not clarify
the
true status of their initial yes or no answers. These results reinforce
the concern of forensic experts about the difficulty children sometimes
have in distinguishing real and suggested events, especially if they
have
previously been exposed to suggestions and are encouraged to narrate
the
fictitious events.

The
source-monitoring procedure
decreased false reports by the older children (5- to 8-year-olds),
especially
right after the storytelling by parents in which real and non-real
events
were mixed together. But a minority of the older children continued to
report that they had experienced suggested events, even after the
interviewers
told the children it was ok to say no and warned them of the
possibility
of fictitious events in the story. Moreover, the source-monitoring
procedure
had no effect on the rate of false reports by the 3- and 4-year-olds.

To improve
the reliability
of child witnesses in criminal cases, say the authors, interviewers
will
have to employ better source-monitoring procedures to enable children
to
differentiate between memories from different sources.

Full
text of the article is available from the APA Public Affairs Office and
at http://www.apa.org/journals/xap/xap7127.html

The
American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC, is the
largest
scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the
United States and is the world's largest association of psychologists.
APA's membership includes more than 155,000 researchers, educators,
clinicians,
consultants and students. Through its divisions in 53 subfields of
psychology
and affiliations with 59 state, territorial and Canadian provincial
associations,
APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession and as a
means of promoting human welfare.